“She has a rare quality of taking full responsibility in the moment for everything she does and says.” –Grigory Dashevsky, quoted in Maria Stepanova’s introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Everyman’s Library, 2023
I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…
I only quote others to make myself more explicit. –Michel de Montaigne, Essays, On the education of children, translated by J.M. Cohen
Think, when you look at people, at their recent birth, their childhood, or their imminent death—and you will love them: such frail creatures. –Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), A Voice from the Chorus
There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in…
[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping. A card index of all imaginable inhumanities. Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…
“And I shall also tell you, dear mother, that each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” –Markel, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. –Ezra Pound, Make It New
I want to defend my culture, not theirs, and I inform you that I like Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare and Goethe and Verlaine and Walt Whitman and Leopardi much more than Omar Khayyam. –Oriana Fallaci,…
These passages, with their rich imagery and their unerring rhythmic ebb and flow, are among the most moving and complex speeches in our literature. But it is the soliloquy in the third act, “To be…